Ohio Get Together

 

L to R: Shelley, Anne, & Joyce

Sixteen years ago I traveled to Ohio from Maryland to meet up with these three women, friends from the days we attended the same Ohio college.  I haven't seen Shelley or Anne since then, but did meet up with Joyce in 2024 when Dan and I traveled to Chicago and stopped overnight at Joyce's home in Ohio.  The three of them have stayed in better contact since Shelley and Joyce have been friends a very long time and Anne travels to Ohio frequently from Texas.

Here's how we all look now.

L to R: Anne, Shelley, me, Joyce

I flew to Cleveland on Tuesday the 18th and the three of them picked me up at the airport.  Anne had arrived earlier in the day and rented a van.  From Cleveland we drove south to Sugar Creek, Ohio in the midst of what's called Amish Country.

We stayed in the same three room suite we had before and remarked that it looked the same.

We had a wonderful time reconnecting: recounting the changes in our lives, sharing stories about ourselves and our families. We are all grandmothers!

Panorama from the balcony one morning.

Setting out that first morning, Wednesday, we soon discovered that Amish Country had changed in 16 years. Rather than shops owned by Amish or Mennonite filled with handicrafts and woodworking, the stores were rather upscaled and filled with imports.  Young Amish women were staffing them, but after talking to one who waited on us at a pizza restaurant, Amish didn't own the businesses.  Nor did the Amish staff arrive by buggy.  Electric bicycles were all over the place and very few buggies in evidence.

In another shop on another day I got up the nerve to ask when the Amish elders embraced electric bikes.  It was 6 years ago.  I then followed up with the question about electric cars but she didn't know if that would be next.  She said she preferred the old ways, but bringing a buggy wasn't feasible because of parking.

We took to the backroads to see some Amish farms since they weren't visible from the main roads.  What we found were very neat and newly updated houses.  Some with solar panels. Obviously the wealth of the Amish had increased in 16 years probably in response to both young men and women who once toiled on the farms, now having jobs bringing income to the families.

The whole "Amish" experience was so different from what we expected. Each ordnung sets their own rules for daily life and as my sister who lives in PA says, the Ohio Amish are considered very liberal.  That did explain a lot. Soon a trip to Ohio Amish country will have to reflect on what once was the former Amish way of life.

I made some purchases but none were made by Amish craftsmen/women. The only thing reflecting on the Amish was this magnet which now resides on the side of my washer with the rest of my collection.

From The Contrarian

 

Words & Phrases

‘Debt crisis’? No, a competency crisis

JENNIFER RUBIN AUG 25

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Whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, Republicans holler about federal debt, lamenting that the economic crisis is around the corner. Their solution (Increase taxes? Cut defense? Don’t be daft!) invariably entails slashing vital domestic programs. But when the debt hit $40T, a new record, Republicans were suspiciously silent. It seems the “crisis” is not a crisis unless the president is a Democrat.

Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) summed it up perfectly: “We get lectured all of the time by these supposed fiscal hawks. And then every single time they grandstand, they do a little dance on the floor that they’re actually going to stand up to the, you know, the debt and increasing the deficit, and then they fold every time like a cheap fan. I’m so sick of being lectured by them.”

In a similar vein, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) blasted the Republican pearl-clutching about the debt. “$40 TRILLION. That’s our national debt. Republicans ran up the tab, handed billionaires another tax break, and now wanna lecture working families about ‘fiscal responsibility,’” she POSTED on X. “You can’t max out the card AND pretend you’re the accountant.”

Under Trump, fiscal irresponsibility has reached new heights. “The Treasury Department’s daily financial report shows that the nation’s debt reached $40.05 trillion on August 18, more than double its level in 2017. The federal debt has ballooned because government spending is outstripping revenue, forcing the U.S. to borrow more money to cover the shortfall,” CBS News reported, quoting Michael Peterson, CEO of the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation. He reminds us, “It’s clearly been accelerating because, like any debt problem, the longer you ignore it, the worse it gets.”

Whether you think the enormity of the debt is itself a crisis or simply a drag on the economy, the immediate results are indisputable. “As the government continues to borrow, interest payments are consuming a larger share of the nation’s spending, creating a compounding effect that further fuels the debt,” CBS News reports. “The U.S. government now spends more on servicing its debt than on national defense or Medicare.”

Republicans’ galling hypocrisy about spending, debt, and deficits aside, the real crisis (and the cause of MAGA’s political crisis) is an utterly corrupt and incompetent regime pursuing policies that worsen inflation, aggravate the gap between rich and everyone else, keep interest rates high, and thereby produce anemic economic results. As University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said recently, this president has given us “the most incoherent, chaotic, unhelpful economic policy” of our lifetime, strewn with self-owns (e.g., mass deportation, frenetic tariff shifts) that undermine even the most robust, innovative economy in the world.

In full view last week was the maladministration of our feckless Treasury, egged on by an unhinged president. Paul Krugman explained the latest machination from incompetent sycophant Scott Bessent (whose laughably false statements describing the nonexistent Golden Age — e.g. “unprecedented economic growth, lasting dollar dominance, and fiscal strength and stability” — are further evidence that this Cabinet is a refuge for unqualified White suck-ups):

High long-term interest rates are an embarrassment for the Trump administration, and Bessent is trying to make the picture look prettier, even though this means undermining the people who are supposed to be making monetary policy.

The maneuver is failing: 30-year yields fell briefly on Wednesday, when the policy was announced, but bounced back on Thursday and were higher as I write this than they were a week ago — clear proof that you can’t gaslight the bond market.

So Bessent, a former bond trader himself, has squandered all of his credibility with his sycophancy, his apparent demands that top officials engage in unethical and probably illegal conduct, and his abuse of the Treasury’s financial power for clearly political goals.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent 

The Wall Street Journal’s headline dryly observed: “The Wild Week When Scott Bessent Was Schooled by the Bond Market.” The report continued: “Investors remain anxious about stubbornly high inflation, mounting federal debt, a deluge of corporate borrowing to fund artificial-intelligence investments, and a new Federal Reserve chairman whose approach to setting interest rates remains enigmatic to many. For some, the Treasury Department’s response only added to the sense of a typically staid market gone disturbingly off-kilter.”

When confronted with Bessent’s face plant, Trump lashed out, fulminating on the failed bond market gambit: “The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.” At best, one can say Trump is shockingly ignorant; at worst, he is so crazed as to imagine the military can storm the bond markets. In any sane political universe, the 25^th Amendment should be seriously considered. 

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It’s no wonder why the American people have utterly lost confidence in the Trump regime. “A new poll [before the latest meltdown] shows Democrats with a 6-point advantage over Republicans on the economy two months away from the midterm elections,” The Hill reported, citing the results of the Financial Times’ Focaldata poll. With 63 percent saying the economy is moving in the wrong direction, Trump and Bessent’s happy talk is more likely to annoy voters than put their minds at ease.

Across the board, voters are giving Trump and his crew rotten marks for an economy they know does not work for their own families. “Mr Trump’s net approval rating for his handling of inflation and prices reached -44 in August, the lowest it has been this term,” the Economist’s YouGov poll tracker found.

And to put an explanation on the worst spasm of government mismanagement of economic affairs in our lifetime, with thuggish threats, Trump drove Canada, our longtime ally, from the negotiating table and slapped a new 50% tariff on our second closest trading partner, leaving Prime Minister Mark Carney righteously indignant and vowing to decouple his economy from the U.S. The result will be another blow to U.S. consumers, “who have been paying for Mr. Trump’s tariff policies through higher prices that have also been driven by the war in Iran and spiraling oil costs,” as the New York Times reported.

So let’s dispense with the Republicans’ hypocrisy about debt, blame-shifting, and disingenuous demands to scrounge for savings at the expense of working and middle-class families. The only real “crisis” is a crisis in economic competence, brought on by MAGA’s devotion to an unhinged, thoroughly corrupt president, and Republicans’ insistence on fattening the wallets of billionaires and trillionaires. In doing so, they are savaging regulations that protect the health and well-being of Americans, indulging in maddeningly self-destructive trade and immigration policies, and blaming hardworking Americans for the results of a rigged economy. The solution to the crisis begins in November, with a Democratic Congress willing to rein in Trumpian chaos, reverse ludicrous policies (including chaotic tariff moves), and return a measure of stability to the Trump-generated economic catastrophe.

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 Just home from a trip to Ohio to meet up with three college friends.  More on that another time.  

I had the following in my emailbox from my friend, Marilyn.  Something to ponder.

We are called "the elderly." But that quiet label hides something most people rarely stop to consider. We are the last living witnesses of a world that no longer exists. 

Look at us and you might see gray hair, slower steps, and the patience that time teaches.

But listen to our story — really listen — and you'll realize something extraordinary.

We are the only generation in human history to have lived a fully analog childhood and a fully digital adulthood.

That's not a small thing. That's one of the most breathtaking journeys a human being has ever been asked to make.

We were born in the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, into a world still rebuilding from the rubble of World War II. 

Our toys were marbles and hopscotch and card games at kitchen tables. When the streetlights flickered on, that was it — childhood adventures were over, and it was time to go home. No smartphones. No streaming. No endless scroll.

We built our memories in the real world. With scraped knees and laughter echoing down streets and friendships formed face to face.

In 1969, we sat in living rooms staring at black-and-white televisions as Neil Armstrong took humanity's first steps on the Moon. Hundreds of thousands of us stood in muddy fields at Woodstock believing — really believing — that music and community could reshape the future.

We fell in love to vinyl records spinning on turntables. We waited days, sometimes weeks, for handwritten letters to arrive. We learned patience because information didn't come instantly. Mistakes were fixed with erasers — not a delete button.

Then the world transformed.

Machines that once filled entire rooms shrank to devices lighter than a paperback. We went from rotary phones and party lines to seeing the face of someone we love on the other side of the ocean — instantly, on something that fits in a pocket.

We watched the birth of the personal computer. The arrival of the internet. The smartphone. Artificial intelligence.

And through every single shift — we adapted.

Not because it was easy. Because that's what our generation does.

We also carry the weight of history in our bodies.

We grew up afraid of polio and tuberculosis. We watched science defeat them. We witnessed the discovery of the structure of DNA, the decoding of the human genome, the transformation of medicine itself. We survived pandemics across decades — and kept going.

Few generations have been asked to absorb so much change in a single lifetime.

And through all of it, certain things never changed.

We still know the joy of a cold glass of lemonade on a hot afternoon. The taste of vegetables picked straight from a garden. The value of a long conversation that unfolds slowly, without a screen interrupting it.

We have celebrated births and mourned losses. Carried the stories of friends who are gone. Watched the world become something our younger selves couldn't have imagined — and found ways to belong in it anyway.

We are not relics.

We are living bridges between two entirely different worlds.

Our memory carries something the modern world needs — proof that progress doesn't have to erase wisdom. That speed doesn't have to replace patience, kindness, or reflection.

So when someone calls us elderly, we can smile.

Because behind that word is something remarkable.

We crossed two centuries. Witnessed eight decades of transformation. Walked from handwritten letters to artificial intelligence — and never lost our sense of what actually matters.

What Now for Democrats?

 

	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Democrats Are Left With Two Primary Lessons It's time to come together — and for others to plan to get out of the way. JENNIFER RUBIN AUG 17   READ IN APP   Beyond the favorite legacy-media, conflict-driven, click-bait coverage (Progressives vs. centrists! Dems in disarray!), Democrats would do well to focus on two aspects of the primary season.  Abdul El-Sayed speaks at a rally after winning the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Minnesota. (WOOD TV8) A time to unite against a common foe Losing Democratic candidates have demonstrated restraint, humility, and patriotism, rallying to embrace their opponents, some of whom bitterly debated hot-button policy issues. Contrary to the “Democrats are at each other’s throats” patter, Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan, Rep. Angie Craig in Minnesota, and Francesca Hong in Wisconsin were among those who after their defeats swiftly adopted a unity message in service of cementing the pro-democracy coalition. Likewise, winning candidates (who had been viciously attacked in some cases by the losers’ backers and by partisan pundits) have been remarkably gracious in forging solidarity after tough fights. Hong, after a razor-thin defeat to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley for the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial nomination, declared: “This campaign was not about getting one person into office. It is about building a movement for permanent affordability and a government that puts working people first. Our movement is strong, and the work isn’t done.” She added, “I fully support him and look forward to working with him to defeat Congressman Tiffany in November.” Crowley responded in kind: “We may not agree on every policy, we may not use the same labels, but we all want safe communities, strong schools, affordable health care, good-paying jobs and a brighter future for all of our children.” Magnanimity was evident in Minnesota as well, as Minnesota Reformerreported on the aftermath of the Senate primary won easily by Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan: In her victory speech, Flanagan looked to swiftly repair the fissures from the costly and acrimonious primary. She reminded her supporters that she and Craig are both proud Democrats despite their differences, and told Craig’s supporters she will work hard to earn their vote. Craig likewise stressed her “top priority” was winning in November. Even before election day, when the electoral handwriting was plainly on the wall, Craig said during the last debate, “We have an existential crisis in our nation with Trump and Republicans, and so I would be right by the lieutenant governor’s side asking my supporters to support her.” Craig continued, “The most important thing in this election is that we beat Republicans. That’s what matters.” Share And in Michigan, Stevens trumpeted calls for unity, telling Meet the Press NOW, there was “no drama” following the primary. She reiterated on CNN, “I’ll do whatever they want!” Stevens stressed she had not given up her values (nor need her voters) but nevertheless was fully committed to making certain the “big tent” held together. Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed meanwhile continues his appeal to voters who opposed him in the primaries. In sum, facing general election Republican opponents who rank as the mostmorally objectionable, extreme, and blatantly racist characters ever to run for office, responsible Democrats are linking arms to capitalize on an election environment in which Donald Trump’s approval is cratering. Under such circumstances, Democrats and pro-democracy independents and Republicans should applaud those who prioritize defeating a fascist movement before it can do more damage. Frequent Contrarian contributor Simon Rosenberg, noting that “every flavor of Democrat had victories in the last few months,” observed recently: You’re seeing the Democratic Party in all of its glory and its diversity, what I call embracing the rainbow.... And in a change election, it’s really important that it looks to the public like we’re changing and we’re not just doing the same old, same old.... We needed to change. We needed to evolve and grow. We didn’t win the last election. And I think you’re seeing our party evolve and grow. That bodes well for the party’s chances in November. A time to move on Democrats (voters, donors, operatives, candidates) should understand that age, not just abstract “generational change,” will increasingly be an issue in national politics. Americans have watched two presidents suffering from glaringly age-related deterioration. They have witnessed the infirm former Senate majority leader’s long absence as the public had reason to doubt whether he remained sentient. Despite a batch of retirements, we are left with a Congress among the oldest by median age, with nearly a quarter 70 or older. Since 2023, “10 sitting members of Congress have died, all 65 or older, and a number of others have spent weeks and even months off the job in the hospital.” And voters keep telling us they are tired of geriatric rule. A recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll found: “80% strongly support or support imposing a maximum age limit for candidates” and 83% “strongly support or support limiting the number of times candidates can run for congressional office.” The waning patience with candidates who have hung around too long was evident in last Tuesday’s Democratic primary in Connecticut’s 1stCongressional District. Fourteen-term incumbent Rep. John Larson, 78, who had a seizure on the House floor this year, lost his primary race to younger moderate Democrat, Luke Bronin. Bronin bluntly argued that “this race is about energy and effectiveness and building a Democratic Party that is strong enough to defeat Donald Trump.” While praising those who served “for decades,” he emphasized that “we would be so much stronger as a Democratic Party if we had more leaders that recognized that part of leadership is knowing when to pass the torch.” Voters agreed. Other Democrats should pay attention. As The Connecticut Mirror reported, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) will find it hard “to dodge questions about age and the calls for generational change that are sure to play a role in future campaigns.” (Blumenthal, shrugging off age as merely “a state of mind,” irresponsibly denies hard truths about aging.) He and senior colleagues in both the House and Senate should consider leaving on their own volition and decline to seek reelection in 2028. The age issue is most acute for Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), who is nearing nearly 30 years in office. With his stooped posture and glasses sliding down his nose, he hardly projects the image of a vibrant party ready to turn the page. Criticism targeting his lackluster rhetoric, inconsistent record in confronting Trump, recruitment of mediocre candidates, identification with the corporate wing of the party, and rigid AIPAC dogma will fuel demands for a leadership makeover. Share The prospect of a leadership fight after the midterms or a strong 2028 challenger may force his hand. But he could decide to avoid messy fights, as did his longtime ally (and milquetoast Senate Judiciary Chairman) Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL), who declined to run in 2026, allowing a talented African American woman, Juliana Stratton, to emerge as his successor. In sum, robust pluralistic democracy demands a flow of fresh faces. Voters ultimately decide when “enough is enough,” as they did with Larson. But, by announcing they are serving their last term, aging candidates could spare themselves and the party unneeded angst and give promising newcomers time to prepare campaigns. If they do, they will earn their party’s gratitude. The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now.